Aria Minu-Sepehr could I convey that it was the whole damned mess? That I just wanted to go back to living on a secure Air Force base in the desert. Mrs. F knocked and entered with her arduous stride, bent knee and all, already apologetic; she even begged our pardon for sitting. The headmaster opened by saying they needed to do more, and she agreed. She regretted not having done enough. He said we faced a crisis and that our survival was on the line. She couldn’t agree more. Fundamental changes. “Indeed.” A shakedown. “Essential.” One of her students was unhappy, he finally declared, and I felt her eyes fall on me for the first time since we’d met: ah, so you’re the reason I’m here! What had the new kid said? Was it really that bad? She had to change the course of this meeting and quick, “But I love Aria dear like my own son. I swear it! I have his best interest in mind. He can testify to that. There is a connection between us. I felt it the first day I met him. I’m sure he agrees. Has anything in particular happened?” The headmaster equivocated, “The details are immaterial. It’s a matter of policy.” The generalities continued. Effusive apologies from Mrs. F. More platitudes. More remorse. And so the matter came to a close, just like one of those facile demerit stamps that settled everything. Mrs. F went back to her unruly class; my father returned to his troubled Air Force; and I was reunited with the back row already steeped in plans for the next assault. At the beginning of lunch hour, Mrs. F asked that I stay behind. Of course she would. Why hadn’t I anticipated this? She’d been reproached by the headmaster for no reason at all and now she was going to let me have it. I started tidying my bench and slipped into an out of body experience which only abated when I found myself at the edge Mrs. F’s desk. I received a well-deserved lecture on how we don’t run off and say anything to anyone, “Especially not to the headmaster.” In a threatening tone and disposition, Mrs. F proclaimed that in the future we would deal with our own problems, that there was a chain of command in the classroom much like the armed forces, “You should be familiar with that. Soldiers don’t go crying to the general, do they?” Any future mama’s-boy stunts, she guaranteed, would make the rest of my life at Kiasat a living hell, which I wholly believed even without her death stare. This simpleton was no simpleton, I thought—Mrs. Hyde had emerged and she was vastly capable and terrifying. Had Mrs. F continued in this other persona, I would have weakened at the knees and peed in my pants. But she suddenly softened and made me 194 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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